Back to Euro-Pessimism? A Jeremiad Too Fond of Gloom and Doom

The future of the European Union is anything but clear. Three main tasks were to be undertaken after the Maastricht treaty came into effect: building a European Monetary Union (EMU) with a central bank and a single currency, engaging in constitutional reform to simplify (and perhaps democratize) the overcomplicated institutional system, and enlarging the union to include new members. All three projects have run into difficulties. Understanding why requires both analytical clarity and descriptive complexity (at times EU politics remind one of the titles of the great French cartoonist Semp‚'s first two books: Rien n'est Simple and Tout se Complique). Tony Judt's new book provides the analytical clarity that can always be expected of him, but falls short when it comes to descriptive complexity.

Judt has always been a thought-provoking, incisive, even combative historian. His writings have dealt with both Eastern Europe and French intellectual and political history. Some of them are masterpieces of debunking -- often justified, occasionally unfair, and always interesting. This essay on the past and the prospects of the European Union, based on three lectures Judt gave at the Johns Hopkins Center in Bologna under the auspices of The New York Review of Books and publisher Hill and Wang, displays all of his characteristic virtues, and some of his defects.

"British -- by nationality if not by residence," Judt nevertheless declares himself "enthusiastically European." But he applies the French dictum: qui aime bien, chftie bien. He concludes that a "truly united Europe" is so unlikely that it would be "unwise and self-defeating to insist upon it." In his view, "'Europe' is more than a geographical notion but less than an answer," and has become "little more than the politically correct way to paper over local difficulties, as though the mere invocation of the promise of Europe could substitute for solving problems and crises that really affect the place." While any skeptical student of the EU would agree with the main lines and conclusions of his provocative argument, its bracing analysis suffers from exaggerations, contradictions, and omissions.

RISING PROVINCIALISM

Judt's main argument is that the factors that led to both Western Europe's economic recovery after World War II and the first enterprises of integration have disappeared -- the abundance of "coal, labor, and dollars"; the presence of Christian democrats in power in the key countries; the division of the continent that saved the builders of the European Economic Community from having to worry about "trying to incorporate into 'Europe' the poorer lands to the east." The 1945-89 era now looks "more and more like a parenthesis." Judt talks about the "cosseted amnesiac Europe of the 1949-89 years." Today, as he rightly observes, Europe is plagued by unemployment, xenophobia aimed at the immigrant workers so welcome in the 1950s and 1960s, and the ever larger "community of the disadvantaged for whom the EU is the only source of relief." The Franco-German equilibrium of the postwar and Gaullist era, based on "the unspoken premise" that "[the Germans] pretend not to be powerful, and [the French] pretend not to notice that [they] are," has given way to German domination of the EU -- a domination that, paradoxically, breeds EU passivity and inertia in foreign affairs.

Similarly, Judt continues, the myth of a united Europe that developed during the "parenthesis" has given way before the return of nationalism and long-repressed national memory. The new Europe is increasingly closing in on itself. After years of negotiation, the 1995 implementation of the Schengen Accord on the free circulation of persons within countries of the union has meant, in effect, "a sort of highest common factor of discriminatory political arithmetic," where "whichever state has the most draconian and exclusive immigration and/or labor laws will be able to impose its requirements on all others" at the expense of foreigners and refugees. Since "Europe" no longer means "a true, definitively cosmopolitan solution to the parochial provincialism and dangerously exclusivist cultures of nation-states," the nation-state is "the only remaining, as well as the best-adapted, source of collective and communal identification." Paradoxically, the survival of the nation-state's "political and cultural credibility" is necessary "if Europe itself is to remain afloat" (an argument that Alan Milward, as Judt acknowledges, has already made). Unlike in the 1950s and 1960s, the EU no longer tends to reinforce the nation-state, but instead weakens it by favoring such strong, prosperous regions as Catalonia and Lombardy.

Even more pessimistic are Judt's reflections on the rise of Central and Eastern European provincialism. He points out that there are many lines of cleavage in Europe: between rich and poor countries, between north and south, and even within the east itself. But it is the east-west division that interests him most. He observes that Nazism and communism combined to destroy "the basis of the rule of law and rights" in Eastern Europe and to wipe out the region's pre-1914 cosmopolitan (largely Jewish) culture. While in Western Europe these norms and traditions were born of the nation-state, in the east they "were born and could only be born from the collapse of empires." Their demise has resulted in nations with huge minorities and pervasive provincialism. Regional cooperation has been a fiasco because of both old hostilities and the COMECON experience.